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What is the Progressive Technology Project?

PTP is a social justice movement partner with a mission to strengthen grassroots organizing groups to achieve their goals more effectively and efficiently through the strategic use of technology. PTP is committed to social justice work because we believe that real political change can only be achieved when people of color, indigenous people, immigrants, women, low-income, LGBTQ, and people whose lives intersect these communities collectively build power in their communities to drive systemic change that dismantles oppressive structures, inequalities, and conditions. Learn more

Hugh Epsey

From our blog

What do databases, the cloud and a morally unjust immigration system have in common? It turns out: quite a lot.
According to a recent report from mijente, “technology companies [are] playing an increasingly central role in facilitating the expansion and acceleration of arrests, detentions, and deportations.”
In the course of researching Palantir, the relatively unknown software company with huge Department of Homeland Security contracts (founded by the famously right-wing Peter Thiel), mijente discovered that many roads lead back to a much more familiar company: Amazon.

Progressive Technology Project Executive Director Alice Aguilar has been interviewed by Rebekah Barber on Facing South! Check out the full interview.
From the Intro:
This week the nation’s attention was focused on the nefarious ways technology is deployed, as Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress about how his company has violated the privacy of its customers and allowed the vast amount of data it collects from them to be used for ethically and legally questionable political propaganda efforts.

To many of us, the Cambridge Analytica Facebook scandal sounds like old news: we have known that Facebook is collecting a dangerously large amount of our personal information for years. However, there is something different with this scandal and it may change the way the US movement thinks about the corporate Internet and our strategies for change.
Since the rise of centralized Internet services like Google and Facebook there have emerged two main arguments against them.

Last Spring, the Progressive Technology Project’s executive director Alice Aguilar joined 50 other movement technologists at the Highlander Center to directly confront the intersection of technology and movement politics. In a historic gathering of movement technologists (about 90 percent people of color, 50 percent women), the challenges of corporate technology domination over our progressive movements was discussed.
One result of the gathering was a thoughtfully written petition we are asking all movement technologists to sign.